


Investigations

by TigerDragon



Series: The Girls In Question [12]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Blood, Buried Alive, Crime Scenes, Cults, Explosions, F/F, Fights, Gen, Impersonation, Injury, Interrogation, Mass Murder, Minor Character Death, Original Big Bad, Police, Post Season 7, Reconciliation, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 03:46:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After settling in to her new home, Buffy's getting paranoid. Everyone's been focusing on finding and training Slayers, and no big bads have emerged--things are too quiet.</p><p>Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.</p><p>On the other hand, she's glad to be back in the game--really glad.  Faith was right all those years ago, and she's okay with that now. They both are.</p><p>Which is a good thing, since they're about to confront an enemy that would otherwise shake them to the core.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Investigations

**Author's Note:**

> We don't own the characters or most of the mythology. Set post-season 7. (Comics? What comics?)
> 
> For our regular readers, welcome back. This picks up a bit after Re-entry leaves off, following the same plot threads, and it also introduces our new villain. We hope you find them as interesting as we do. As always, we love your comments, and we hope the new addition meets with your approval. :)

**Seventh Arrondissement, Paris. December 22nd, 2004**   
  
_ Fraternité _ was pretty upscale for a nightclub, even by downtown Paris standards -  the entrance hallway had been done in marble and mirrors, with gold-plated rails and plenty of red carpet. At least, the carpet had probably been red before - it certainly was now, and it had the slick half-reflective quality of wetness that picked up the swirling blue lights from the police cars outside and gave plenty of warning that you’d spoil your shoes by stepping on it. Even if the blood came out, the scratches from the broken glass shards glittering in the fibers probably wouldn’t.   
  
There was a lot of blood in a man the size of the bouncer laid out beside that carpet, and most of it seemed to have wound up on the floor.   
  
“Ew.” Buffy wrinkled her nose as she picked her way through the wreckage. “I am burning these shoes when we get back.” After a few yards she reached a patch of clean-ish carpet and turned in a slow circle to take in the damage. It was probably a mistake - she’d seen carnage in her time, but this was something else. She covered the sudden bile in her throat with a joke.“Whoever did this must have a hell of a cleaning bill.”  
  
“Cheaper just to burn your clothes and buy new ones, B.” Faith slipped past her and walked to the rail overlooking the dance floor, ignoring the burned and shattered ruin of bottles, decor and bodies that was all the was left of the bar, and pulled a couple of latex gloves out of her pockets so she could rest her hands on the rail without smearing her hands in the blood of whoever - or whatever - had been splashed against it before they ended up a heap on the floor twenty feet down. “Jesus.”  
  
“Are you sure this is us? I mean, it could just be crazy people. You know, normal crazy people. With fire and possibly drugs.” Willow shied away from an inch-long glass shard sticking out of the wall at eye level, nearly collided with Buffy and wound up inches from Faith. The sudden sound of her fighting down the urge to contaminate the scene with the contents of her stomach was probably audible for a good ten feet, given the dead silence of the place. Emphasis on dead.  
  
Faith surveyed the carnage on the dance floor, skin pale and eyes fever-bright, and her hands flexed against the rail hard enough to crease the gold plating. The police photographing bodies and evidence down below them moved like people in a nightmare or a minefield, all unsteady and over-careful steps, and the bodies were thick enough down there to make walking without stepping on them the sort of job you had to plan ahead for. More burn marks, here and there, but the only damage to the walls was long lacerating score marks and the occasional section of shattered, powdered marble about the size of a dinner platter. “No guns. No bullet holes. No explosives. Yeah, I’m thinking this is us.”  
  
Swallowing down her own bile, Buffy locked herself down into general mode. “Also the green and blue blood.” After a few seconds of concentration, she got her own hands to unclean so she could point down at the dance floor walls. “The scratches could be claws or bladed weapons--I can’t think of anything normal that would do that unless our perps were into heavy construction equipment.  I’m pretty sure the dents are from punches. Maybe hammers or clubs.” Taking a disposable breathing mask out of her bag--a disturbingly helpful suggestion from Dawn--Buffy took slow, careful breaths. It had been a long time since she’d seen this much blood and mayhem. It was just as awful as always, but turning off her freak-out was easier than it had been before her vacation. Something to be said for rest, anyway.  
  
“We’ll get a close look, but I’m thinking you’re right. Looks like hand-work the whole way through. Could be vampire, could be demon.” Faith said the words briskly and economically, holding on to her zen with both hands, but she didn’t fill in the third blank. The one they were really here for, the scary one.  _Could be Slayer._   
  
A short, angry man in a police blazer bounded up the stairs toward them, shouting in French, and Faith turned to give him a short bark of a reply before going on more reasonably in English. “Excuse me, but my colleagues do not speak French. You can manage in English, Inspector?”  
  
“You are Americans?” He was balding and over forty, his expression incredulous as he glanced over the three young women, and Buffy could see him gathering steam for another outburst - this one possibly in a language she understood.  
  
Faith beat him to it, smooth as Columbo. “Agent Chase, Interpol. This is Jane Landsbury, my partner, and the red-head back there trying to keep her lunch down is Doctor Rosenburg, occult specialist from Oxford. Similar case, smaller scale - we think it might be connected, escalation, office sent us down to take a look around.”  
  
“I wasn’t told! If you contaminate my crime scene...” The Frenchman waffled for a minute, visibly pissed but lacking for ground to stand on.  
  
“Five by five, Inspector. We’re just here to take a look, and you can copy us on the forensics when you get them.” Damn if Faith didn’t sound like it was the most natural thing in the world. Apparently Beginning French and How to Lie to Law Enforcement were both classes available at Slayers, Inc. “We won’t keep you - you got things to do, right?”  
  
The inspector hesitated another minute, then nodded and took the out. “ Oui .”  
  
“Damn,” Buffy murmured once he was out of earshot, “Yelling at each other just like on TV. We really are cops now, huh?”  
  
“Far as they’re concerned, B.” Faith smiled grimly and started down the stairs, the flex of her hands rubbing the blood on her gloves out into patterns on the latex. “Let’s get to work.”  
  
 _ It was just your garden-variety Skilosh demon--creepily ugly, conveniently unsympathetic due to its horrible reproductive method, and fluent in English, French and various demon languages. It was the perfect informant, which was why it found itself clapped securely in heavy-duty chains and locked in a sub-basement cell in a London office tower.  
  
“We know you know something,” Buffy told it matter-of-factly. “Seriously. Reliable sources here. Or sorcery. Whichever. We know, is what I’m saying.”   
  
The demon raised what on another face would be an eyebrow.   
  
“I’d listen to her, three-eyes.” Faith, lounging against the table, toyed with her cup of coffee and looked almost bored. “She gets kinda cranky when you fuck her around. Gutted me once for messing with her.”  
  
“Merde,” the demon swore, and eyed Buffy with a little more respect.   
  
The blonde cracked her knuckles. “Well? What is the Red Right Hand?”  
  
A tense moment stretched out with the Slayer and the Skilosh staring each other down, and then the demon cleared its throat.   
  
“Some say they’re a group of demons who hunt together, destroying all in their path. Some say they’re evil spirits who possess unfortunate humans to do their dirty work. Some say they’re the most powerful vampires in the world.” It shrugged. “Some say it’s a street gang with illusions of grandeur.”   
  
“Bullshit.” Faith bounded out of her chair and crossed the room in three quick strides, slamming her hand into the wall beside the demon’s head with enough force to make the chains rattle, and her eyes were suddenly wildfire gems lit with something starved for blood and death. “Some say this, some say that - what the fuck do you  know , three-eyes, or have I gotta start taking chunks off you?”  
  
“The Black Forest!” It jerked back from her, yanking at its chains, its front eyes shut and the eye in the back of its head almost rolling in terror. “I left France because they were moving down from Germany, because they were making their chapels of death in the West now instead of Moscow and Berlin! Merde, but I thought it would be safer here!”  
  
“Chapels of death? I don’t like the sound of that.” Frowning, Buffy stepped forward, arms crossed, head tilted to one side, apparently unconcerned with Faith’s threat. “What do you mean?” Face stony, she was doing a great impression of someone who wasn’t afraid of what she was about to hear. _  
  
“He wasn’t kidding, was he? It really is a fucking chapel of death.” The blood wasn’t exactly ankle-deep - the room wasn’t perfectly level, and they were standing on the higher side - but the technicality didn’t make for a lot of comfort. Faith had swapped gloves when they’d gotten to the base of the stairs, and now her fingertips were tracing the edge of the shattered hole left in the marble by whatever had hit it like the contact might tell her something. Willow, pale as a ghost, was working her way around the room with a discreet scrying stone in one hand and a digital camera in the other. That left Buffy to stare and listen to Faith musing to herself.  
  
Eyes darting around the scene, unwilling to look at anything for too long, images started to string together into patterns in Buffy’s eyes. Inspecting a dent in the marble at shoulder-height reminded her of fights she’d been in where dodged punches had left dents in concrete walls. In some places on the floor, blood ran into cracked tile and concrete, cracks that seemed familiar. She was pretty sure she’d done similar damage herself when fighting Glory. Some of the broken furniture, bottles, and stage equipment were stained with blood in ways that suggested their use as improvised weapons.  
  
And the blood--there was far too much for it to have been vampires. Even vamps who killed large volumes of people for fun usually drank the whole way through.   
  
Could be demons. She really, really hoped it was demons.   
  
“B,” Faith whispered, “I think you’d better see this.”   
  
She’d pried some of the last of the marble shards away to bare the metal backing, and clearly printed in the metal where her fingers were wresting was the print of knuckles. The impression of a hand.   
  
It was barely bigger than her own.  
  
The cold feeling in her throat and pounding in her ears made Buffy pretty sure that all the color had drained from her face.  
  
“Fuck.”  It was barely a whisper.  She turned a stricken look on Faith. “I hate being right.”  
  
“We’ve got the Hounds a call away, B. If it’s just one girl...” But it wasn’t. Couldn’t be. Nobody had gotten out of the club - nobody had even gotten up the stairs. Nobody had gotten out of the fire exits. Somebody had held the stairs, and somebody had blocked the doors, and somebody had stood up there and watched this happen while someone or someones had slaughtered a whole room full of demons, humans and maybe even some vampires for what might as well have been no reason. No reason was one of the nicer possibilities, actually, because reasons for this started with ‘obtaining ultimate power’ and worked down on the list of good things from there.  
  
“We’re going to need more than just the Hounds.” Buffy’s voice was low and quiet, like it had been so many times in Sunnydale. Another devastating truth. Another Big Bad of unknown scale.  
  
“We don’t know that yet,” Faith argued softly, still playing the voice of reason, but there wasn’t much conviction in her tone and her eyes were already sweeping the room again. “Maybe we caught it early this time.”  
  
Buffy shook her head. “Moscow. Berlin. Black Forest. Last night.” She hated being the gloom-bucket, but someone had to say it.  
  
“Shit,” Faith hissed between her teeth. “I just decided - I hate it when you’re right, too.”  
 _  
Dawn, Willow and Giles were not happy. Xander had a mouth full of cupcake, so it was hard to tell, but he probably wasn’t going to be happy either - a fact he confirmed by getting in the first words, despite the cupcake. “Wait, so you just let him go?”  
  
There was a beat of complete silence.  
  
“What?” Xander swallowed the rest of the cupcake in his mouth, then waved the half in his hand for emphasis. “Creepy three-eyed demon is back on the streets laying eyes in people’s heads and not giving one to me, and I don’t get to complain?”  
  
“Xander,” Giles muttered as he took his glasses off to clean them, “I really don’t think this is the time.”  
  
“Besides, we gave it a stiff warning and a ticket to Beijing. Chao-Anh knows it’s coming, so if it gets up to the old tricks again, boom.” Faith snapped her fingers. “Problem solved. Still, Xand, way to make with the short-sightedness.”  
  
“Is than an eye joke? ‘Cause you’re way over quota on eye jokes this month.”  
  
“Guys,” Dawn cut them off softly, “stop it. Bicker to bleed tension later. Think now.”  
  
Clearing her throat to bring attention back to the matter at hand, Buffy took the time to gave each person in the room a serious look. “So. We have a Big Bad on the move, no word on how big or what their objectives are, but ‘chapels of death’ sound like they need immediate investigation. Thoughts?”  
  
“I’ll have to do more research, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve heard of the Red Right Hand before. Well, beyond Milton anyway. Might be a connection there, but I doubt it.” Giles leaned back in his office chair, sufficiently absorbed not to complain about Faith taking her semi-accustomed place sitting on the corner of his desk, and his fingers tapped lightly against the rim of glasses as he cleaned them. “A new player?”  
  
“Or an old one under a new name,” Dawn put in. “Rebranding kinda thing. The bad guys do that too, right?”  
  
“Well, they mostly like their tradition - it’s an old-time feel-good nostalgia kind of thing,” Willow stopped herself mid-ramble, gave the group a rueful smile, then gave Dawn an approving nod. “It’s possible. I can have the Circle do a specific scry for them, maybe give Europe an extra-hard magic stare.”   
  
“Shouldn’t we have heard about a thingy in Europe? Aren’t they right next to us?” Xander piped up again, and got another exasperated look from Giles for his trouble. “Just saying, British man.”  
  
“The old Watcher’s Council was very strong in Europe, but the … sudden... departure of most of our membership hit the continent particularly hard. We have perhaps four or five active Watchers to call on, most of them in Romania, Hungary or along the Mediterranean. Europe’s monsters have been less... ambitious... than their American counterparts for many years now. A change in that would be most unwelcome.”  
  
“Either way, it’s a thing.” Faith put a note of finality in her voice, locking eyes with everyone in the room but Buffy in turn - eye, in Xander’s case, but same principle - and got nods back. She let the silence hang a second, then turned back to Buffy and quirked half a smile. “Sure you don’t wanna put the other thought you had in front of the group, B? Crazy or not, we got some brains here maybe ought to be working on it.”  
  
All eyes turned towards Buffy again. For a moment she ignored them, pouring herself a cup of tea to give herself a moment--and, okay, she was getting to like the stuff, even if her preferred amount of cream and sugar habitually horrified Dawn.  After her first sip of sweet milky goodness, she put the cup down and swallowed.   
  
“How many Slayers do we have from Eastern Europe?”  
  
Giles glanced at Faith, who said nothing, and finally took the question himself. “Five, perhaps six?”  
  
“Four,” Faith corrected laconically. “Yana and her sister in training, plus Valentina and Galina active.”  
  
“And how many Watchers do we have stationed there?” Buffy took another sip.  
  
“Two.” The look on Giles’ face was apprehensive.  
  
“So, very few Slayers from that region, fewer Watchers taking care of things...it’s possible that whatever this is has to do with all the girls we aren’t picking up.”   
  
Dawn frowned and wrapped her arms around herself. “Slayer murders? Or could they be ritual killings? To find Slayers, or steal their powers, or...” She trailed off, disturbed, and plucked at the paper on her partially-nibbled cupcake. Buffy had chosen the shiny foil kind in eight pastel colors.  
  
“Possibly,” her sister admitted. “Possibly we aren’t the only ones recruiting super-powered teenagers.”  
  
“Like what...” Willow paused, glanced at Faith, hesitated.  
  
“Like what the Mayor did with me, only bigger.” Faith filled in the rest of the sentence unflinchingly. “Yeah, I don’t like the idea, but it’s possible. I can’t argue with B on that. So we better start thinking pretty hard about it, right?”  
  
“I’ll get the Circle working today.”   
  
Xander, his face pale, went joke-less for once. “I’ll get on the horn to everyone we know and tell them it’s all hands on deck time.”  
  
“And I will reach out to the Council’s contacts for anything unusual in Europe.” Giles put his glasses back on, then glanced at Buffy. “Do you think that will be enough for now?”  
  
Sighing, the blonde nodded. “As much as I’d like to make with the immediate slayage, we can’t do much without intel.”   
_  
If Willow had looked more likely ghostly since she was  actually a ghost, Buffy couldn’t think of a time. Though to be fair, it wasn’t like the situation exactly brought out the sunshine-and-not-ghoulish trains of thought, so maybe she was forgetting something. Possibly.  
  
Probably not.  
  
“So I think I know why our clairvoyance and prognostication spells are coming up with the big zero,” she went on, having already given her best forensic scientist impression and not getting a lot more out of it than either of the Slayers had. “When I tried to do a walkback on the room, things got a little weird.”  
  
“And not the normal kind of weird?” Buffy frowned, shifted on her heels, and tried not to get a worse feeling about this than she was already having.  
  
“Definitely not. I mean, I got the bodies and the killing and the horrible death and...”  
  
“Red,” Faith muttered gently, “point, before you make yourself faint again.”  
  
Willow tried to muster a glare. It didn’t work very well. “That was a very special circumstance, I’ll have you know!”  
  
Stepping closer and laying a hand on the witch’s shoulder, Buffy tried to keep her’ tone soothing and patient. “Willow. Take a deep breath.” She refrained, out of long habit, from saying that everything was going to be okay. Jinxing their already fucked (excuse her French) circumstances was the last thing they needed. Mostly she just tried to look as patient and understanding as her mother always had. Well, usually. When she and Dawn were fighting, Joyce had been rather (and rightfully) exasperated, and shit Buffy really shouldn’t have been thinking about that now.   
  
Right. Focus. Think police-y thoughts. Try not to notice that, after taking her advice, Willow was turning a little green. Right, bodies. Death-smell. Non-Slayer scent system. Problematic.  
  
“Sorry,” Buffy winced.   
  
Willow managed a wan smile. “Worst advice-giver ever. Anyway, I saw the... you know, the slaughter. But I couldn’t see the people doing it. They were like ripples in a mirror or really vague shadows - there but not there. So either we’re dealing with seriously crazy-powerful ghosts which I kinda doubt because there’d be a whole resonance thing, or they have anti-scrying charms. Like, you know, stealth. For magic.”  
  
“Wait, you can do that?” Faith was suddenly, almost explosively exasperated. “You can do that and we don’t have that? Since when?”  
  
“We do have that, don’t we?” Turning to Willow, Buffy’s expression was the ‘oh-no-you-didn’t’ of a boss being told that there happened to be a large hole in the wall of her office.  
  
“Kinda. Technically. Not really. In the office and the camp at Wales. We think.” Willow looked between the two of them. “What? We’re working on it!”  
  
Hand to her forehead, Buffy counted to ten silently. She would not yell at her best friend and chief magic user. She wouldn’t.   
  
Well, maybe a little. But that would be later.   
  
Letting a long breath out, she opened her eyes again. “Could you get a read on how many shadow-perps there were?”  
  
“Not really. Exactly. When they clump up, they kinda vanish into each other. But there was only one actually down on the floor, I know that much.” Willow shivered. “I think the rest of them were just watching and, you know, guarding the exits.”  
  
“Right. Because why spoil a good show by getting in the performer’s way, huh?” Turning a slow circle on her heels, Faith bit her lip for a long minute and then shook her head. “If she’s one of us, B, she really knows how to party. Of the not at all good kind.”  
  
Swallowing, Buffy clamped down on the sick feeling that was threatening to drag her out of her leadershippy state. Not to mention her cover. Even as bad as the scene was, breaking down into tears or a catatonic state was less than professional. And crying always made her look younger. She hated that.  
  
“We know it’s one crazy-bad Slayer, with an unknown number of hench-somethings, all magically stealthy,” she reiterated to her colleagues. “They’ve been in Russia and Eastern Europe doing similar crazy-evil stuff until yesterday at the latest. We don’t know where they’ve gone. They could still be in town, actually.”  Closing her eyes, she rubbed her temples. It didn’t help. “Is there anything else? Please tell me we’ve learned all we can because I’d really like to get back to the hotel to wash away the top three layers of my skin.”   
  
“Um... kinda. One more thing. Maybe.” Willow fished out a plastic bag and held it up, showing a blood-spattered silver key on a loose-link chain. “I’m pretty sure one of them dropped this, because it just appeared in the middle of my walkback. In, y’know, mid-air.”  
  
“A key.” Faith was suddenly quiet, intense. Not shouting, not musing. Focused. “Any chance you can find us the lock, Red?”  
  
“Yeah.” Willow nodded, still pale but just as focused. “You sure you want to do the charge in first and ask later thing?”  
  
“As opposed to ask first, find nothing and having nothing to charge? I’m kinda leaning that way.”  
  
Biting her lip, Buffy glanced between the witch and other Slayer. “I can’t help but think that the three of us, awesome as we are, might be outmatched. I don’t want to walk into a deathtrap. Dying is so three years ago.”  
  
“Where’s the trust, B?” Faith grinned crookedly and pulled out her phone. “You don’t think we hopped the Chunnel all by our lonesome, did you?”  
  
The blonde felt a matching grin pull at her lips, horrifying backdrop be damned. “Release the Hounds?”  
  
“Exactly. Light ‘em up, Will, and we’ll run ‘em down.”  
 _  
The call had gotten Buffy up in the middle of the night - Giles, brisk and efficient, not quite impatient. “We may have something for you, Buffy. Can you pack a bag and drive in tonight? If it is a real lead, we’ll need to investigate very quickly - perhaps leave tomorrow, during the day, perhaps sooner. Dawn is already waking people.”  
  
“Evil. It couldn’t do things when I’m awake. Figures,” Buffy muttered. “Yeah,” said aloud, fumbling for the switch on her bedside lamp. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”  
  
Once she was on her feet, she started to wake up. In fact, once she had dressed was contemplating her weapons rack with a mug of coffee in hand, she felt almost electric with anticipation. Not entirely good anticipation, but an awake-and-alive feeling nonetheless.  
  
When she walked into Giles’ office, gym bag full of various kinds of sharp and pointy death, she found the entire gang.   
  
Almost.   
  
“Faith’s down in her room,” Dawn had explained between looking at photos that would have turned Buffy’s stomach when she was that age. “Getting prepped. She’s usually the one on point, so we all churn up the data and she looks at it once we’re done. Minimizes confusion, she says.”   
  
“I just think she’s lazy,” Willow put in with too much cheer for it to be a real complaint. “Can I get the disk for these, Dawnie? I want to e-mail them to the Circle so they can backstop me on the whole presence-or-absence of evil ritual thing.”  
  
“Can I just say ‘ew’?” Xander added. “I mean, stab wounds sure, but then the subway gets involved and I’m all squicked out again.”  
  
“Right. Please do not show me those,” Buffy asserted. “Where are we going, and are there any cupcakes left?”  
  
Dawn lifted the decorative cover off the serving dish Buffy had brought the cupcakes in on. There was one left.  
  
“Sure, take the last one,” Willow pouted. “It’s not like everyone else ate them while I was in Wales.”  
  
Grinning, Buffy tossed the confection to her friend. “Here. I can always send someone for Starbucks.”  
  
The cupcake stopped in mid-air and hovered itself discreetly over to Willow’s hand, where it was promptly devoured. “Yum. Chocolate and espresso. How did nobody save me more of these?”  
  
Xander opened his mouth, and Dawn kicked him discreetly under the table. He shut it again.  
  
“Paris,” she informed her older sister. “Probably tomorrow.”  
  
With a frown, Buffy sighed. “I like Paris. Stupid evil getting all over it.”  
  
There was general agreement.   
  
“Okay, I’m going to go talk shop with Faith,” the Slayer announced. “Yell if there’s an apocalypse.”  
  
“Scream, you mean.”   
  
“That’s Xander’s job. He does the best womanly screams.”  
  
“Hey, I resent that! My screams are not womanly.”  
  
Buffy made her escape before the verbal skirmish developed a clear winner.  
  
An elevator ride and map-check later, she stood outside a door on the ground floor that gave no indication of being a residence. That didn’t surprise her, though. She’d seen Faith live in a generic motel, a generic prison, borrowed accommodations in her own house, and a rather nice apartment paid for and decorated by the most dangerous family man she’d ever met. The younger woman didn’t seem much for nesting.  
  
Buffy pushed the doorbell and waited.  
  
Nothing happened. She thought about pushing it again, or maybe knocking.  
  
“It’s open.” The heavy wood of the door muted Faith’s voice to a practical whisper, but even so she could hear the amusement in it. Apparently, this was another of those little details everyone knew and nobody remembered to mention.  
  
She opened the door, and damn if she hadn’t had the right idea about the nesting. Or maybe it was a penitent murderer thing - Angel’s lair under his office back in the old Angel Investigations days had the same ‘nothing here but weapons, shelves, a fridge and a bed’ vibe. Well, sans the tatami mat and with more cages and chains, but Faith had apparently had enough of the chain thing. Probably just as well. There were not-happy memories down that line of thinking.  
  
The woman herself was sitting cross-legged on the mat, a plain short sword in dark metal laying across her lap, whetstone in one hand and polishing cloth in reach. She was drawing the stone over the blade in long, sure strokes, a long metallic note humming in the air with each motion of her hands.   
  
They looked as strong, calloused and beautiful as always, Buffy thought. Another line of thinking that was difficult, but at least in a bittersweet way.  
  
“Hey. I take it I have you to thank for all the weapons in my house being sharp and shiny?”   
  
“Seemed kinda cruel not to have them ready for action. Like seeing your Christmas present before it gets wrapped and then not getting to play with it.” Faith didn’t look up from her work, but tension drew a subtle line across the curve of her shoulders. Apparently, it really had been intended to be mysterious. Oops.  
  
She decided she might as well shed some light on that particular can of worms.   
  
“I’m glad it was you.”  
  
Faith didn’t say anything for another five strokes of the stone. When she did, it was almost too soft to hear. “I didn’t know if you’d want to know I’d been in the house.”  
  
Buffy opened her mouth to object, then stopped. Before her vacation, she would have been upset at Faith coming into her space uninvited, even before it was technically her space.  
  
“I don’t mind,” she said quietly. “Though...if you were worried, why come at all?”  
  
“Someone else might have gotten it wrong.” Faith stroked the whetstone again, then tested the edge, and finally picked up the polishing cloth and began stroking it over the length of the sword with deliberate care. It wasn’t even half an answer, and the silence clung in the air until finally she looked up from the sword and met Buffy’s eyes with more than a little uncertainty in hers. “You deserved something perfect. Everyone else helped, but they didn’t quite... get it. Not even Dawn.”  
  
An odd little smile, half pleased and half pained, flickered on Buffy’s face. As she leaned against Faith’s desk, she crossed her arms in a way that was much more of a self-hug than a stern or fighting gesture.   
  
“I know what you mean.” She swallowed and stared at her shoes for a long moment before raising her head to look at the other Slayer.   
  
“Faith...While I was out there, I realized you were right.”  
  
Those brown eyes watched her, uncertain and quiet. “Not been right about a lot I can think of, B.”  
  
“I’m not exactly the queen of correctness, either.” Buffy admitted. “Giles woke me up with a call to arms this morning and I realized I’d been waiting for it. That’s what I came back for, as much as for people I knew and trusted.”   
  
Folding her hands, she stood again and began pacing.  
  
“It bothered me for a long time,” she conceded. “I hated it that slaying makes me feel alive the way nothing else did. All that death, and I was having a good time? Even if I fought for good? I couldn’t handle it.”  As she turned, from the corner of her eyes she could see Faith sitting perfectly still.   
  
“I saw car accident in Milan,” she continued, hoping she was making sense. “Some paramedics came, and while they were rushing around and helping people I could see that they were getting a rush out of it. The pressure was exciting, or maybe they liked the blood, I don’t know.” She stopped. “But they saved that guy, and if they enjoyed themselves, so what? They did good.”   
  
A few feet from the mat, Buffy sat on the floor. “So you’re right. I love being a Slayer, and I don’t think that makes anyone a bad person anymore.” Twisting her hands in her lap, she couldn’t look at Faith just yet. Still too raw, too exposed. Admitting you’d been really, really wrong was hard.  
  
“When Giles told me about what you guys figured out - about how we got to be Slayers in the first place, about the men and the desert and the demon - it messed me up.” Faith’s voice was soft and quiet, full of a strange steady peace that seemed to settle all the air in the room toward stillness. “I thought that was it, that was why I went off the rails, that was why I enjoyed hunting and hurting and killing people, and what the hell had we done bringing all of that into the world? I think I must have thought about that for a week, maybe two - not just now and then, but all the time. And then I was cleaning up after doing forms, because that seemed like the only way I could get any peace, and I was looking at one of the swords when I realized I had it all backward. That it hadn’t been the demon inside me or the hunt or the kill or any of it - that it was always all just me, just like Angel told me.” She reached out and took Buffy’s hand, gently pressing the fingers open, and laid the textured hilt of the sword in her palm until those smooth fingers closed around it. “Look at that, B. Sharp edges, perfect balance, surface like a mirror, dangerous as anything. But it’s not evil, is it? It’s not good, either. It’s just a sword. Just like us. A sword doesn’t decide to do what’s right or hurt somebody. A person does that. The sword’s just the tool they do it with.”  
  
“Yeah.” Buffy ran her thumb over the hilt, admiring the patterns. “I think we should put that in the training material. Screw all all that ‘Chosen this’ and ‘special destiny that’ crap. Make it like one of those puberty manuals.”  
  
“Heard worse ideas. You should have seen the stuff Dawn had to cut out of Giles’s first draft. Would have made a mythology major blush.” Faith’s fingers lingered against Buffy’s wrist for a few long seconds, then withdrew. “You were right, too. One of the girls in jail - she was in for drug sales, really big stuff - she’d say ‘you gotta know if you’re playin’ the game, or the game’s playin’ you.’ I was too hurt and maybe too stupid to know the difference.”  
  
“Not stupid,” Buffy shook her head. “Too young. We both were.” After an experimental heft, she turned the sword and handed the hilt back to Faith. Watched her sheathe it in one smooth, expert motion.   
  
“Figure they maybe shoulda set the age for turning into Supergirl over the driving age?”  
  
Buffy smiled wryly. “I dunno, if I’d grown up normal and only recently gotten Chosen I’d probably have done the reasonable thing and run like hell.”   
  
“Somebody’s got to save the world, B. Guess it might as well be us.” Faith put the sheathed sword down, then reached out and tentatively brushed her fingers over Buffy’s cheek as if she might be afraid the touch would burn her. “You still okay with me watching your back on this thing? I can take Satsu or Kennedy or one of the other girls, let you sit it out unless there’s trouble.”  
  
Filing away the wash of emotions at Faith’s touch for later, Buffy put on a grin and reached up for a more comradely squeeze of Faith’s shoulder. “Nuh-uh. I’m excited to kick some evil butt, remember?” Her expression softened. “I’m glad it’s with you.”  
  
“Me, too.” There were about a thousand emotions in the flash that flickered behind Faith’s eyes, and then she banished them behind a devil-may-care smile. “Best out of three falls and then a movie marathon until they book us a ride?”  
  
Already pulling her hair back into a sensible ponytail, Buffy grinned in return.  
  
“Winner picks the marathon theme.”  
  
“Deal.”  
  
Buffy won, but only by the hardest. The theme was animals. Faith bitched good-naturedly most of the night, though Buffy was sure she liked the one about the man-eating grizzly bear.  
  
It was more comfortable than it had any right to be.  
_  
“So... mausoleum. Gotta say, I’m not feeling the creativity.” Crouching on a roof near the graveyard the key had pulled them to from across town, Faith took a second look through her binoculars (night vision, no less) and clicked her teeth. “Trap?”  
  
“We have TV ads, don’t we?” Buffy sighed. “It’s not like they’re unaware of our existence. If I were them, it would be a trap.”  
  
“I was against those, by the way,” Willow piped up. “Just sayin’.”  
  
“Stow it, Red,” Faith put in with good-natured relish, then handed Buffy the field glasses. “You want to call it a night, B, we can call it a night... but I don’t know where we get a better lead on these guys.”  
  
“We have a lead, we have backup, we have lots of pointy things.” Hefting the Scythe, Buffy nodded to Faith. “And I at least have some serious need for violence-based therapy. Shall we?”  
  
“Lead on, B.” Faith lifted her hand to her face, speaking into the small microphone sewn into the lining of her hunting jacket. “All points, the boss and I are going in for a look. No itchy trigger fingers, girls - be sure it’s got fangs before you put a crossbow bolt in it, ‘cause there’s lots of civvies around in the City of Light and we got enough innocent bodies for one night on our hands. D, you’re our eyes for the night - you see things go to hell, you take the shot and call it. Satsu, you’re lead for the storming party if it comes to that. Any questions?”  
  
“Sure,” the rich African accent of D’s voice hummed in Buffy and Faith’s earpieces, “you want fries with that?”  
  
“All the trimmings, hotshot. All the trimmings.” Faith dropped her hand and checked the sword at her own hip, then the smooth Toledo steel of the vambraces mostly hidden under the loose cut of her jacket. She knew the abstract engravings of wild horses dancing in the surf on them by touch, because since the moment Buffy had sent them to her they’d been a silent promise in metal that B was coming back someday.   
  
Now she was back, and they were going in to risk their skins together again, and she couldn’t remember the last time she felt so alive.   
  
She reminded herself to check her crossbow, too, then hefted it over her shoulder and gave Buffy a saucy grin. “World’s a stage, B. Ready to break a leg?”  
  
Surprising herself again, Buffy smiled grimly. “I’ll be aiming higher.” Then they both laughed, something wild and hungry and joyful singing in the air between them.    
  
They passed through the graveyard like wraiths themselves, swift and silent and perfectly deadly, and Faith slid the key into the lock it was practically trembling to fill before twisting it and yanking back hard enough to throw the whole metal weight of the door open in a single motion. She was already low, ducking an anticipated hail of sharpened darts or fire or whatever else might be planned, and when it failed to materialize she checked the door frame for razor-wire or other unpleasant surprises with metal-shielded knuckles before finally sliding inside.  
  
The place was empty and dark, but there was something off about it that it took her a moment to place - it wasn’t cold. Certainly not the kind of cold that the night outside was.   
  
“Someone’s here, B - or at least paying the heating bill.”  
  
Pulling an expensive Halogen flashlight out of her pack, Buffy threw light around the interior of the place, still standing on the threshold.  “And decorating,” the blonde commented. The room immediately inside the door was very normal for a mausoleum--stone coffins and angel sculptures, marble columns, lots of dust, etc. etc. However, there was a hallway leading away from it, and in the harsh beam of the light Buffy saw a plush rug, three framed photographs and several doors that were less stone and gloom and more Mausoleums of the Rich and Famous.   
  
Seeing no immediate dangers, Buffy turned the light onto the door. “Do you think Spike was into a more traditional look, or that he was just strapped for cash?” she asked conversationally while checking for locks, bolts, or huge slabs balanced and ready to slam shut when the right trap was triggered, that sort of thing.   
  
“Strapped for cash. Remember that big old mansion thing Angel used to hang out in? This reminds me of that, only more emo-punk. Man, when did evil get last-decade trendy?” Faith paused, rocking her heels slowly as they came to the central junction of the two long corridors that formed the top floor of the building. The seal on the stairs down to the catacombs had been pulled away - roughly enough to leave scoring in the floor of the marble around it - and the air smelled of dank earth and expensive perfumes. “Figure they’ve got the party palace downstairs, and this is just the leftovers?”  
  
Nodding, Buffy wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. How many times to I have to explain to evil that even the best fragrance is no substitute for mold control?” Another backwards sweep, and she followed  Faith down the old metal stair. “I’m hating this girl more and more.”  
  
“Not liking her myself, I have to say. Maybe it’s the mass slaughter that’s making such a bad first impression.” Faith paused at the bottom of the stairs, her whole body tingling with sudden tension, and she eased her crossbow off her shoulder before cocking it audibly. “Vampires, B. They’ve been here. Lots of them. Feel it?”  
  
Buffy shifted her grip on the Scythe. “Oh yeah. Can we call the cavalry while fighting, or should we do it now?”  
  
“Thinking now’s sounding pretty good, but... something’s off. No tripwires. No spikes. No toothy monsters trying to eat us. I dunno, B, feels like something’s really wrong here.” Faith stepped away from the stairs and bounded a few steps into the open hollow of the crypt proper, taking in the congenial mess of wrappers and plates on the scattered mix of expensive tables and furniture, the harsh phosphor glow of the HD TV still sitting on with an ignored PS3 spinning next to it, the distant whisper of music turned down but not off. “If it’s a trap, they ought to be ready for us, but if they’re ready for us, why does it look like we interrupted a party? If it’s not a trap, then what the fuck is with the ghost show?”  
  
Training her light around the crypt in a smooth arc, Buffy narrowed her eyes as she put little bits of information together. “One really evil Slayer, lots of back-up vamps. Too many plates and cups for just one or even five humans.” Completing her sweep, she put her back to the wall and frowned at the room. “Either they have a large supply of groupies slash ambulatory Happy Meals, or we’ve got more than a few rogue Slayers.”   
  
Sound crackled in Faith’s ear, high power radio distorted by the earth and stone above her. “Captain, we got movement in the graveyard. Lots of movement. Gonna send Satsu in to hold the door for you.”  
  
“Sure, good... wait.” Faith’s eyes widened sharply, intuition filling in the gap in logic. “Wait, wait, wait. Satsu, hold. Hold position. Do not, do  _ not _ get in here after us, you understand?” She threw the crossbow onto one of the couches, grabbed Buffy hard around the waist and threw her flat to the floor, then covered her with her own body. “Hold position, dammit, this place is going to...”  
  
The world went white and red and shook with thunder.  
  
The world stopped moving slightly after her vision cleared and before the ringing in Buffy’s ears stopped. When she could think again, she determined two things. Good news, both she and Faith were still breathing and clutching their weapons, uncomfortable as it was to be laying on top of the Scythe. Bad news, the feeling of fresh air she’d been unconsciously aware of since setting foot in the mausoleum had gone.  
  
“We need to get a dog,” she muttered, poking Faith in the ribs to get off her. “A bomb dog. A bomb-and-vampire dog. Demons too? How many things can you train a dog to sniff for?”   
  
“Maybe multiple dogs,” Faith agreed, hesitating a moment and lifting her head to make sure the ceiling wasn’t going to come down on them before finally rolling up onto her knees. “Shit. Guess we oughta send whoever designed this place flowers - it’s really built. Think there’s anything left upstairs?”  
  
“Sure. Plenty of rubble.” Pushing herself up, Buffy winced as the motion renewed that hit-on-the-head feeling. “When we get out of here we’re getting CAT scans. That shockwave was no joke.” Leaning her back against the wall, she sighed. “Which brings me to the main problem, which is that I’m pretty sure we’re trapped.”  
  
“No air movement, lots of echo... yeah, gotta vote for trapped, too.” Faith tapped the earpiece in her right ear two or three times, then pulled it free and dropped it into her pocket with a little shake of her head. “No carrier. Either the rubble’s blocking the signal or the shock turned the inside into electronic kibble. Hope the girls are handling themselves up there.” She shifted on her feet for a moment, restlessly angry at the thought of her own helplessness, then pulled in a careful breath and reminded herself that fire burned air and fuel. _ Don’t be fire. Be water. Flow with it. _ “Have to say, B, when I was hoping to get you alone this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”  
  
“Yeah, the whole buried alive thing kinda kills the mood.” Eyes widening, she focused on breathing slowly and not panicking at her own assessment of the situation. Turning the flashlight on, she swept the room again. “Okay, we got entertainment system, furniture, trash. We also have a heating system, probably plumbing, maybe even some ventilation. A girl’s gotta breathe and use the powder room.”   
  
“Pipes probably aren’t big enough to crawl through, but worth thinking about.” Faith turned a slow circle, studying the wide layout of the room and the half-collapsed side tunnels leading into earthen burial corridors. “Digging out through the rubble up top, not a good idea. Think we can get down one of those things far enough to get out from under the building? Then we’ve only got four, seven, maybe ten feet of dirt max between us and air.”  
  
Standing carefully, Buffy made one last sweep of the room. “I can’t see any convenient vents to crawl through from here, so yeah, probably our best option.” She examined the tunnels. Each looked about as unpromising as the last. “Eenie, meenie, miney mo?”  
  
“That one.” Faith pointed, then caught Buffy’s look and shrugged. “Instinct. I figured it can’t be worse than the others, and it’s got at least ten feet of more or less clear space before I see broken beams.” She hesitated a fraction of a second, grabbing her crossbow and slinging it, then reached out and pressed a hand against Buffy’s shoulder. “Grave dirt and no air - can’t be good memories. You good?”  
  
Placing one of her own hands on Faith’s arm above the vambrace, Buffy closed her eyes, focusing on the warmth of her companion, the fact that she could move around, the comforting presence of her weapons, and mostly succeeded at ignoring her silent hysteria at the thought that she probably would have been better off with a shovel.   
  
If she were honest with herself--and now was either the best time for self-awareness or the worst, she couldn’t decide--Faith’s presence was pretty much the only reason she wasn’t curled in a ball in the corner. She gave her fellow Slayer one squeeze before letting go.  
  
“I am now.”  
  
“Good.” Faith didn’t press. She just squeezed Buffy’s shoulder in answer, crossed the room to crack the Playstation down the middle with one hard twist of her hands, then dumped the electronic guts and handed one half of rigid plastic to the blonde with a tight smile. “Hey, look. They left us hand-shovels.”  
  
Deliberately smiling through her tenuous zen, Buffy took one. “Better than trying to stake our way out.”   
  
She followed Faith down the tunnel, rooting the flashlight in a pile of dirt when they couldn’t go any further. Soon she was lost in the rhythm of digging: scoop, plop, scoop, plop, grimace at dirt under nails, scoop, plop.  
  
“Beam,” Faith said some small eternity later, half-breathlessly, running her fingers along the flat edge of a stretch of wood pitted and dark with age, its surface feathered with subtle cracks from the explosion. They were barely a few feet under it now, both crouched on a mix of fallen debris, stone bricks from the collapsed tunnel ceiling in front of them and a mix of dirt and brick they’d pulled free themselves. It was a hard down angle back to the room - they’d have to crawl if they wanted to back out now, but the burn in their lungs was tangible evidence that there wasn’t time for that. “Holding the hard-pack that’s holding up everything else. Cracked but didn’t break - can’t be that much weight on it.” She looked down at Buffy, eyes two points of brown shadow in the flashlight-broken dark, and she took a careful deep breath that only partially eased the ache in her chest. “You still with me, B?”  
  
Mouth open, shoulders heaving, lungs straining for oxygen that wasn’t there, Buffy nodded, looking up. Without a word, she pulled the Scythe from behind her, examining the axe end, looking at the few feet of space they had. If she laid down, she just might have enough leverage.  
  
Of course, that would dump a lot of dirt in her face. She shuddered at the thought, at the  _ memory _ of it, and closed her eyes. The darkness was seeming more comforting now and less terrifying, which worried her in a distant, muffled sort of way.  
  
Even then, it didn’t even occur to her to ask Faith to be the one to get buried.   
  
“B?” A warm hand grasped her wrist in concern.   
  
Buffy Summers gritted her teeth. Demons, human thugs, too many vampires to keep track of, a genuine  _god_ ,  and the First had all tried and failed to kill her. Some evil super-powered teenage bitch was  _not_ going to get her so easily.   
  
“Gotta lay down. For leverage.” Hefting the axe, she slithered into position.  
  
“If there’s,” she took another uselessly deep breath, “danger, you’ll have to fight,” and another breath, “I’ll be digging.”   
  
“Got you,” Faith said simply, reaching down and wrapping one hand around to dig nails into the small of Buffy’s back and bracing the other against the exposed wood of the beam, forcing her fingers past the hard-packed dirt above it until she had a grip on the top of it. “Always.”  
  
Gripping the Scythe, Buffy took aim, closed her eyes, and held what little breath she had left. With a savage stroke she chopped at the beam. Dirt rained down, then stopped. Shaking it out of her face, she opened her eyes again, seeing that she hadn’t broken all the way through. Took aim again, very aware of Faith’s hand on her, and swung again.  
  
The earth rained down to smother her, falling heavily onto her chest, grit pushing into her pores as the weight grew heavier. In the airless dark she pushed the Scythe up, using the blade as a wedge for the dirt. The hand on her waist slid, lost contact for a terrifying fraction of a second, found the edge of her elbow and wrapped tight around her wrist. She felt the hard-leather palm of Faith’s gauntlet dig into her skin, felt the tremble of the muscle in the arm pulling her up through the crush of earth with the Scythe as her leading edge, and then the resistance on the tip of the blade was gone and the dirt was around her wrists and then her elbow, and it was that same blessedly terrifying moment of pulling herself from the ground that was struggling to swallow her that she’d dreamed of so often in the last three years, and she twisted the Scythe to press it flat against the ground and pull herself the rest of the way on the hard metal bar of it.   
  
Faith, knee dug into the broken edge of the beam that had given her the leverage to push up through the cascade of earth and the scraping edges of broken wood and one hand wrapped around the cracked edge of a tombstone, took a hard gasp of breath with more dirt in it than fresh air and pulled her own throat and shoulders free of the loose-pack dirt and gravel with a choking grunt of effort. Paused another moment, struggling with the crushing pressure of the ground squeezing around her chest, and fumbled blindly with the free hand that Buffy’s sudden motion had torn free for a fresh point of leverage.   
  
Coughing around the dirt in her throat, Buffy lay on solid ground, sucking in sweet, oxygen-laden air as fast as she could between wheezing and spitting out mud. Once her brain and lungs were more or less functional again and she’d decided that the various fights going on around them could wait, she got to hands and knees and crawled over to Faith.   
  
Even though she found a patch of ground next to her companion that  _ seemed _ solid, Buffy still laid on her stomach, the Scythe flat on the ground next to her. In a few moments, she had dug Faith’s ribs free and got a good grip on her belt. The pull started somewhere in one of their brains, went through both of their muscles like a single effort, and Faith came free of the tumbling mix of soil and gravel with a half-gagged gasp as she finally filled her lungs for the first time in what felt like forever.  
  
Something moved on the edge of Buffy’s peripheral vision - tall, broad-shouldered, extra-pale - but she was flat on her stomach and most of Faith’s weight was across her. Bad position. Exposed.   
  
Faith pulled the stake free from the small of Buffy’s back and drove it up past the spine of the pouncing vampire and into his heart, and his dust showered over them like a sprinkling of fine powder.   
  
“Shit,” Faith finally choked out around the dirt still clogging her throat. “Five by five, B?”  
  
“Five by three, maybe. Alive and functional.” She coughed again. “God, I’m going to have gritty boogers for a week.”  
  
“Find this girl,” Faith noted shortly around her own coughing. “Kill her ass.”  
  
“Kill her so hard,” Buffy seconded.  
  
Finally breathing something resembling normally, Faith pulled herself to her knees and then managed her feet, scrubbing the dirt from her eyes so she could sweep the cemetery. Mausoleum: ruins, as expected. Smoking a bonus. Vampires getting dusty. Her girls kicking ass. All to the good.   
  
Twenty feet away, Ariel took a vamp in the shoulder with an elbow shot and then punched a stake through him.  Threw the disintegrating ruin away, searching for targets. A knife came in on her from behind, instinct kicking in the second before it drove into the back of her neck, and a pivot left the knife buried through her shoulder-blade instead. The sleek blonde girl who’d done it struck for a kill, got a punch in the face for her trouble - Ariel was nothing if she wasn’t tough, knife in her or not - and seemed to take the taste of blood in her mouth as a cue to realize the fight wasn’t going her team’s way. She got in a hard kick to Ariel’s knee, dumping her to the grass, then turned and ran for the edge of the cemetery with more acceleration than a well-tuned Harley.   
  
“Runner,” Faith grated, and then plunged after the girl like a bloodhound soaked in mud and filth.  
  
Only a half-second behind, Buffy followed, dirt burning in her lungs, the rest of her body just glad to be alive. The sight of Faith in full-out hunting mode brought her blood up, ready to fight and hungry in a number of ways, only one of which wouldn’t complicate her life right now.  
  
Except, shit. She’d have to wait until going home to get good fish and chips. Damn Xander for getting her hooked on them.   
  
The girl hit the low wrought-iron fence around the cemetery at a flat run, one hand reaching out for the waist-height bar to hurdle the whole thing in a single motion, and she had both feet fully off the ground when Faith’s right hand drove down into her ribs from above and the fingers of Faith’s left wrapped themselves in the loose blonde fall of the girl’s hair in a savage backward pull that spun her around with as much force as the blow to her side had knocked her down with. The iron half-bucked at the impact, laying a horizontal line of bruises across the girl’s back, and Faith’s boot left a muddy print in the expensive leather jacket over the other side of the girl’s ribs that knocked the air clean out of her. The girl grabbed for another knife, choking on the impact, and Faith kicked down on her wrist to knock the weapon loose before dodging an open-handed shot to her right knee by tumbling back out of reach.  
  
They were back in rhythm now. Buffy’s turn.  
  
Coming in at the side, Buffy tilted the Scythe like a nine iron and gave her best golf swing to the girl’s head. The satisfying  crack of impact sent the rogue Slayer sprawling to the ground, twisted to get a faceful of dirt. Even after digging her way out of burial for the second time in her life, Buffy was still  fast , and before the teenager had a chance to get up, the Slayer had the girl’s wrists in a painful twisted hold, her knees in the small of her back.   
  
“Nice one, B.” Faith loped over, a lupine grin shining through the dirt clinging to her face, and she knelt down so she could drag the girl’s head up - bowing her spine painfully in the process - and get a good look in her eyes. “So. You got a name, crazy girl?”  
  
The girl hissed, tried to struggle, gave up on a snarl of pain. “Fuck you!”  
  
“Feeling the urge too, I gotta admit, but you’re not near sane enough for me.” Faith pulled the blonde’s hair a little tighter, the sharp jolts of pain from her already burning scalp setting the girl’s teeth audibly grinding, and her voice dropped to a growl that seemed to have gravel and grave-dirt still clinging to it. “You’re gonna tell us all about your boss, sweetheart, and you’re gonna tell us all about you. Because that girl with a grip on your arms? That’s Buffy Summers, sweetheart, and you just tried to fucking bury her alive. So we aren’t going to have what you’d call a polite conversation.”  
  
Digging her knees in deeper, Buffy smiled in what she was pretty sure was a psychotic fashion. “I’ve been known to do terrible things to my enemies,” she offered cheerfully. “Bisected a guy once.”  She waited for that to sink in. “Well? Will this be a talking sort of night or a stabbing you sort of night? Cuz I could go either way.”  
  
The girl’s eyes were about the size of lightbulb’s, and Faith’s lips pulled back over her teeth. “Yeah. I think she’s getting the memo now, B, but if you wanna borrow my knife...”  
  
“Talking,” the girl squeaked. “I’m Jaina and I like talking, I’m all about the talking.”  
  
“Goooood.” Faith drew the word out with deliberate relish. “Nice to meet you, Jaina. Let’s talk about your boss, shall we?”   
  
“Yes, lets,” Buffy chimed in. “Please give her name, location and life goals. Any tips on killing her will earn you bonus limbs at the end of the night.”  
  
The girl made a sound that was not quite pure terror, but would pass for it in dim light. “Tyra! Tyra. Her name’s Tyra, she’s here - she  was here - night’s blood, I don’t know where she is now, she left the four of us here to back up our cousins in case you people showed up... fuck.” She trailed off, stiffed, eyes dilating with sudden terror. “Fuck, she’s going to know I talked, she’s going to fucking  kill  me...”  
  
“That’s later, sweetheart. This is now.” Faith gave the girl a hard stare and her patented crazy smile. “Trust me, later is better.”  
  
“She’s going to kill you for this,” Jaina trembled. “She’s going to kill all of you for this.”  
  
“Not had the best track record with success so far,” Buffy suggested in a pleasant tone that went disturbingly with the way her hands tightened on Jaina’s wrists. “Nobody’s been able to kill me for a long time, and even then I have a habit of getting better.” Shifting her weight on Jaina to prevent her attempt to kick her way free, Buffy tutted. “We’re not done yet. Did you just call vampires your cousins?”  
  
“Our other halves. You know, like us but dead.” Jaina arched her back a little further, trying to loosen the grip on her, and got Faith’s fingers around the back of her neck for her trouble.. “They complete us, we complete them. If you’re really Buffy Summers, you must fucking know  that.”  
  
“Because?” Faith growled.  
  
“All of us know about Buffy Summers and her vampires,” the girl spit out. “The blond warrior and the raven-haired angel. Only she can’t keep hers - not like Tyra. That’s why we’re better. That’s why we’re going to...”  
  
The words cut off in a wet splash of blood, the girl’s windpipe slit open from side to side, and Faith barely had time to throw a reflexive hand in front of Buffy’s throat before the next knife slammed point-first into the metal plates across the back of her hand and glanced off into the railing with an audible clatter. She rolled left, got her body between Buffy and the street, glanced the next throw off the leather of her jacket - sharp enough to slice through and ring on the metal beneath - and she put her whole focus on the slender hand of the woman visible across the street, on the knife in it, and kept it there in spite of the part of her brain screaming for her to get a good look at what had to be their enemy.  _ No time. No time for that. Focus on the knife. If she gets another throw in, you have to stop it clean.  
_  
“God, I hate it when they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid,” Buffy muttered.   
  
Her back to Faith, Buffy gave a cautious sideways glance across the street, trying to get a sight line to the knife-thrower without becoming a target. Before ducking back down she managed to get a glimpse of long dark hair pulled up into a bun, deathly pale skin (no surprise there), and dark eyes glittering with an intensity that was either madness or conviction or both. Even in stillness she had an ancient grace about her, as if she’d been carved of dusky marble, and the shadows clung to the dark fabric of her clothing like a second garment. It gave her a disembodied quality that made even Buffy’s nerves flutter.   
  
“So you are Buffy Summers.” The voice was soft, strangely accented, so preternaturally resonant that even at a murmur it carried clearly across the length of the street between them, intimate as an unwelcome touch. “Hiding behind your protector, inducing a girl to betray her calling. How disappointing.”  
  
“And I care why?” Buffy retorted. “I’m not exactly trying to win the friendship of the undead. Kinda the reverse, really. Y’know, with the slaying.”  
  
“How limiting.” The vampire heaved a subtly exaggerated sigh. “All that power, and so little ambition. You really are a pale shadow of her.”  
  
“Says the walking corpse.”   
  
“We all have our imperfections.”   
  
“Slaughtering your own troops isn’t what I’d call imperfection,” Faith growled out, risking the words without taking her eyes off the knife. “More like a serious character flaw.”  
  
“She was a traitor to us from the moment she yielded.” There was a hard edge of disgust in the vampire’s voice now - as if the idea was profane. “No-one cares if traitors die.”  
  
“Bet you don’t put that in your recruiting brochure.” Buffy risked another look around Faith’s shoulder. “Speaking of ‘us,’ I want to meet this Tyra girl. She sounds like a party. Any chance?”  
  
That earned her a strange, shiver-inducing laugh that reminded her creepily of the way Angelus used to talk about her. “All in good time, Buffy Summers. Queens do not meet in common alleys.”  
  
“Right,” she replied with an eye-roll. “So, this isn’t over, we shall meet again, blah blah dramatic exit?”  
  
The flash of the thrown knife was actually almost petulant - that had to be a first. By the time Faith was done deflecting it and Buffy was done ducking, the vanishing act was thoroughly done.  
  
“Gotta admit,” Faith muttered grudgingly as she knelt down to pick up one of the knives, “she at least does it well. Not much on the creative, mind you, but points for execution.”  
  
Rolling her shoulders as she stood, Buffy sighed. “And again with the indoctrination. This Tyra chick must have some crazy charisma or something.”   
  
“Maybe she just fronts a good rock band.”  
  
For a second Buffy frowned in confusion, then blinked. “Huh. So she could be good, but it’s her supporters that really make the show?” Uselessly brushing dirt off herself, she glanced back up the hill to where the fights had been. “I like that better than the alternative.”  
  
“Me, too.” Faith knelt down and rested a hand on the blood-soaked ruin of Jaina’s hair, then sighed softly and closed her eyes. “Poor, dumb kid. She can’t have been much older than we were.”  
  
Pulling out her phone, Buffy sighed again. “Yeah. I hope...” There was a pause as she blinked back some unexpected tears. “I hope we can save some of them.”  
  
Faith just knelt there while Buffy made the call - they’d need clean-up, cover-up, the whole works - and when she finally looked up again the dirt on her face was streaked with tears. It didn’t quite dim the smile on her lips, though, or the steel of trust in her eyes. “Saved me,” she said, soft and simple. “You’ll save them, too.”  
  
Buffy tilted her head in thought, the last twelve and especially the last three hours turning through her mind, and felt the certainty in her harden toward something crystalline and unyielding. “No,” she said slowly, holding a dirt-smudged hand out to help Faith up. “ _We’ll _ save them.”   
  
Faith reached up and wrapped a bloody, dirt-stained hand around hers, pulling herself to her feet, and then cracked a real smile - one of her smiles - for what felt like the first time in an age. “Shower first. Saving the world later.”  
  
This time, Buffy didn’t argue. They went back to take a head-count of the Hounds, to get a room to shower in, to start planning for the next search, to make a fresh start on putting a stop to the death that was still clinging to both their skins.  
  
Faith didn’t let go of her hand.  
  
Buffy didn’t argue about that, either.


End file.
